She stands up, and bows. “Where will you send me, my lords?”
The small one has a kind face, she decides. It is a kindness hidden by scars, his bald head, the black severity of the Kanlin robes. But it is a gentle face, nonetheless, and so is his voice.
He explains, speaking for the three of them, what is to happen to her. She feels a flicker of fear, listening, like the first tongue of flame as a fire is started, but she pushes it down.
She is, after all, a princess of Kitai, and her father’s daughter, and she sees now, with clarity, that it would have been pursuing a false simplicity to live out her days upon this mountain, pretending otherwise.
SHE GOES LOOKING for Meshag and his wolf when she leaves the pavilion and the elders.
She doesn’t expect to find them unless he wishes it, but she is still certain he will not have gone away, not without speaking with her.
As she winds her way down green terraces late in the day, away from others, among pine trees, the scent of them, she is remembering the cave where she placed her handprints on the body of the king-horse on the wall—before the entrance to the last cave, where she’d been afraid to go.
He’d gone in there, Meshag.
She watches the sun go down.
Late at night, she lies in the narrow bed they have given her, in a simple room with a fireplace, one small table for a washbasin, a chest for belongings, and nothing else, and he comes to her.
A tapping at the door, once and then again. Soft, you could think you had imagined it.
“Wait,” she says. She has not been asleep.
She rises and dons her grey robe and goes to the door and opens it. Moonlight in a cold, clear night. She is barefoot. Goes out nonetheless to where he stands a little distance from her threshold.
She sees, without surprise, the grey wolf not far away, the yellow-gold of its eyes. It is achingly quiet upon the Mountain’s summit. No one stirs. No bells in the dark hours. The moon dims all but the brighter stars. A wind blows.
“Thank you,” she says.
He is lit by moonlight but she cannot see his eyes, which is always the case at night. He is wearing the leggings and boots he wore on their journey.
The wolf sits. It is alert but calm, she thinks. She doesn’t understand wolves, however. She might easily be wrong.
He says, “You were looking for me, before?”
His Kitan has improved, she thinks. Several days of talking with the Kanlins. The open space and the buildings here are silver in the moonlight, otherworldly.
“I was afraid you had gone.”
“Afraid? But you are safe now.”
She had thought he might say that. It pleases her to be right, if only in small things. It is a way of not being lost.
“There is a rebellion. I wonder if anyone is safe.”
“They will not send you back. They have told me this.”
“They won’t. Someone else might. I don’t know.”
She hears the wind. The wolf rises, moves a little, settles.
Meshag, standing very still, says, “I do not think so. Too much will change now, Kitan and Bogü, and others. But if … if they do this, I will know it. And I will come for you again.”
And with that, she begins to cry.
She sees the wolf stand up again as she does so, though she is silent, only the tears sliding down her face. Meshag does not move. And because she hates to cry—she tells herself later—because of that, she steps forward and reaches up and takes his head in both her hands and kisses him. First time she has ever done such a thing, outside of dream.
It feels like a dream here, on the Mountain, in silver light. She holds her eyes open, as long as she can, and so she sees when his dark eyes shut, and only then does she close hers, knowing he is not, after all, entirely gone from the world and needs of men.
His mouth is unexpectedly soft, but his arms do not come around her, and when she steps back, light-headed, a little unsteady on her feet, her heart pounding much too fast, he says, gravely, “I did not take you from my brother to claim you for myself.”
“I know!” she says, too loudly. “Of course I know that.”
The small movement of his mouth she has learned to call a smile. “You are so certain?”
She feels herself flush. Finds she has nothing to say.
He murmurs, “I lose what there is in this, if I take you now.”
“I understand.”
A silence, wind. She is suddenly aware that the wolf has gone. At length, he says, softly, “In different lives …”
He leaves the thought unfinished. He doesn’t have to finish it.
“I understand,” she says again.
Eventually, she adds, “You are leaving now?”
“Yes.”
She’s expected that. She feels the tears on her cheeks in the night. She manages a smile. “I have questions,” she says.
She hears the sound that is his laughter. “Always.”
Another sound, to her right. The wolf is back, and has growled, though softly. Meshag says something to it in his own tongue. He looks back at her. That stiff nod, last time. He lifts one hand—it is not at all a graceful lover’s motion—and touches the side of her face.
Then he goes, running after the running wolf.
His horse will be waiting somewhere, she knows. Probably two or three horses, for the Bogü seldom ride just one when they have a long way to travel.
She thinks of walking out to where she can overlook the slopes and the plain below them to the north; she might see them go. It is cold, though, and there really is no reason to go look.
She stands in the moonlight, alone on the mountain. She wipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe. The world, she thinks, is impossible to measure.
TWO MORNINGS LATER she leaves as well, with a good-sized party of Kanlins, heading south. She is dressed in black, with a hood, as if she is one of them.
They are riding to Teng Pass.
The elders, considering and communing, have decided that this is where Kanlins will be needed. This has happened at that pass, it seems, years ago, and before that, and before.
In warfare there are times of frenzied urgency and violence that saturate the churned earth with blood, and there are periods when everything seems to slow, or even come to a halt.
The rebel armies had taken Yenling with alarming ease and some savagery. An Li’s well-horsed cavalry thundered down from the north, forded the Golden River, and appeared before Yenling’s walls before any opposing force could arrive to defend the second city of the empire.
This had been anticipated within the Ta-Ming Palace. It was accepted by the emperor’s senior mandarins in the Purple Myrtle Court that this would be so.
There would be casualties in the east, lamentably. How not? This was an armed rebellion, and no one was unaware of how ruthless An Li could be.
Teng Pass, which protected Xinan itself, was manned and guarded. Not with the very best soldiers at first. Roshan might possibly have been able to fight through, had he moved immediately from Yenling, but the pass was notoriously narrow, easy to defend. And going south of it through the hills, or crossing and recrossing the river north, were appallingly treacherous (especially with horsemen). Attempting such manoeuvres had destroyed armies over the centuries. Teng Pass was a central square on the Kitan gameboard.
Put another way, warfare could also be a dance, and often the steps and music were well known by both sides.
The vanguard of the rebels—now calling themselves the Tenth Dynasty of Kitai—consolidated their hold on Yenling, killed anyone they decided to kill, seized control of the Grand Canal ports nearby, and waited for their foot soldiers to subdue the north and join them.
Subduing the north proved a difficult matter, however, made more so by the arrival of imperial forces from the Sixth Army to attack supply lines. Rebel troops were forced to remain northeast in order to prevent cities from being retaken—or even throwing open their gates to the
emperor’s troops.
Roshan and his generals had nourished hopes that the Five Families, long displeased with certain measures taken regarding taxation and land rights, might join the rebellion, or at least not oppose it. In the event, though there was some discussion among the northern aristocracy, this did not happen.
Instead, almost from the start, there were insurrections north of the river, in the supposed heartland of the newly proclaimed Tenth Dynasty.
One might dislike the current imperial family, find them presumptuous, of modest lineage, and far too inclined to consolidate power in Xinan … but compared to a barbarian and his vulgar sons and generals? Well, there was really nothing to choose between, was there? And no one in the northeast, having lived with Roshan as governor for years, was inclined to be seduced by the notion that he would be easily manipulated once in power.
In addition to which, the proud leaders of the Five Families knew their history and geography as well as anyone.
Roshan had probably missed a chance, they agreed, exchanging elegantly scripted missives on silk paper, or meeting at one estate or another over summer fruit and wine. He had erred: by waiting in Yenling to have himself crowned, then setting up the trappings of a court, by not moving swiftly enough with the advantage of the first army in the field.
It was understandable that he might try to assume the mantle of legitimacy, of a new emperor. A hero of the suffering Kitan people, bent on destroying a corrupt first minister, and replacing an aged, hapless, love-snared emperor.
This was the tale as Roshan needed it told. But keeping his army in the field, away from barracks and families, as summer heated up and autumn’s harvest came—and was not gathered—was going to be a challenge.
With Teng Pass secured and Xinan safe, the emperor’s forces could slowly gather from all directions, assemble ranks and regiments, and eventually squeeze the rebels, north and south, as a man might squeeze a grape between his fingers.
This was, in fact, the almost universally accepted opinion among historians of what should have happened.
For all his disclaimers that he’d never held a position at court, never wanted one, and would not pretend to understand manoeuvres there, it was Sima Zian who continued to anticipate the events that began the change of the world.
Zian did not write the “Song of Everlasting Sorrow.” That was a younger poet, years after. But the Banished Immortal did, over lychee wine in Tai’s city garden on a summer evening, indicate what he thought was about to happen. The Second Army, under Governor Xu Bihai himself, was in Teng Pass by then, blocking the rebels.
There were skirmishes, no major engagements. Armies of both rebels and empire were moving all over Kitai. Locusts crossing ruined fields, a poet had written during another war long ago.
A second blazing star had been reported, falling in the east.
It had to do with apprehension, Zian said that night, amid fireflies. “Great events often begin in fear. And the Ta-Ming is a frightened place. Mistakes can be made.”
Tai remembered looking around, even in his own garden, to see who might be placed to overhear. They were alone except for two of his Kanlins, at some remove. They were always with him now. He’d stopped permitting himself to be unhappy about it.
Zian, not even nearly sober, had expounded on what he expected in the not-too-distant future. He quoted two poems and a passage from the Cho Master.
Tai had listened, and looked at him under two lanterns burning, and had said, when the poet was done, “My brother would not permit that. It will not happen.”
Zian, he remembered, had laughed: that uninhibited amusement that was so near to the surface in him. An ability to find joy in the world.
“Not permit?” the poet said once he’d subsided. “Have you considered that your brother’s influence is not what it might once have been?”
“It isn’t?” said Tai. He put his wine cup down. “Why not?”
“Because you came back to Xinan! Liu reminds the first minister of you. Think about it!”
“What am I thinking about?”
“Those twenty riders he sent for your horses. You think your brother approved those?”
Tai knew the answer to that. He’d seen Liu’s face that day.
“No,” he said. “He knew it was wildly foolish.”
“Wildly foolish. That is good! But Wen Zhou still went ahead, didn’t he? Do you think Liu was even told it was happening?”
“I doubt it.”
“You see? I speak for the sage in the cup! Pour me more of your good wine, friend.” He waited for his cup to be filled, then added, softly, “We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects that folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful.”
Tai would remember that, too.
She has always been able to tell when he is uneasy. It is a part of her training—and her nature. The ability to read a man’s mood is critical in the North District. It is one of a singing girl’s essential skills.
When it comes to Wen Zhou it is not—unlike some other men—an important signal when he shows no inclination to make love. He can absently take her on a bed or against the wall when he is disturbed, his attention entirely elsewhere. Or he can linger at ease, let her make music for him, on an evening when his thoughts and mood are perfectly tranquil.
With Zhou, gauging his mind often has to do with how he answers when she speaks to him. Or does not answer. Rain can almost feel the whirling of his thoughts some nights, and knows that though he is with her, though he might even be inside her, he is scarcely present—and is even (though he’d be angered if she were ever so foolish as to say this) afraid.
But he is. For several nights now, when he arrives home late from the Ta-Ming and comes to her, she has sensed his disquiet, and tonight it is even stronger.
Although she has no understanding of what has happened, she is aware that Shen Liu, his most trusted adviser, has not appeared at the compound for days.
They must be meeting at the palace, she decides.
She very much misses one aspect of the North District: all kinds of tidings arrived there in a steady, endless flow, like a river. You needed to be skilled in extracting what was true (or might be true) from what was only the idleness of streets and markets, but you heard things in a house like the Pavilion of Moonlight, you felt connected to the world.
Here, ironically, in the home of the most important man in Kitai, according to some, Rain is cut off from events and their report. The other women are useless in this regard, and the servants alternate between stolidly uncurious and wildly credulous.
She knows that the rebels have taken Yenling and that the emperor’s forces are holding Teng Pass. It is summer now, fighting season, but when autumn comes, with winter to follow, the rebels in the field should be in serious difficulty. The imperial forces might be in trouble, as well, mind you, since Grand Canal supplies will be interrupted, but the west is theirs, and Roshan is bottled up in the northeast and in his proclaimed capital of Yenling.
On the other hand, Zhou is clearly uneasy, so there must be something she doesn’t know. She puts aside her pipa and says, a slight risk, “You are quiet, my lord.”
He does not answer.
After a moment she takes up the instrument again, and begins to play. They are in her chamber, it is very late. The sliding doors are open to the summer.
Gazing out, he says quietly, as if he’d not even heard her words, “Rain, have I ever been cruel to you?”
She is genuinely startled, hides it as best she can. “My lord, your servant knows—all your servants know—how good you are to us!”
His expression is odd. “But have I been cruel? To you?”
Rain shapes a smile. “Never, my lord. Not ever.”
He stares at her a long time. He stands up and finishes his wine, sets the cup down. “Thank you,” he says, and walks out.
She hears him speaking commands. He wants his horse, and guards. He is going back
to the palace. At this hour?
And … Rain. He’d called her by her North District name. He never does that. And expressing gratitude? It is disturbing.
The next day she dismisses her servants mid-afternoon, claiming a need to rest after a tiring night with the master, and she sets about filling a discreet cloth bag with some of her most valuable jewellery.
Later, walking alone, as is her carefully established custom, towards the far end of the garden—not far from the rosewood gazebo—she buries those jewels at the base of a cherry tree.
The flowers on the tree have come and gone by then: beautiful for a little time, then falling.
In the Ta-Ming Palace, and in Ma-wai when she wishes to be there, a woman dances for the emperor of Kitai.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER XXIII
There have been rebellions before in Kitai, civil wars from the time the earliest dynasties of the empire were forged, and shattered, and reforged.
In one of these conflicts, notoriously, a Sixth Dynasty army was treacherously undone by a false order sent to its generals, purporting to be from the palace. Since that time, measures have been undertaken to offer commanders on a battlefield assurance that communications from court are truly their orders.
A certain number of imperial seals are made, fired in a small and guarded kiln on the grounds of whatever palace the emperor is using. On these seals dragons are variously depicted. On the backs of the seals are numbers, in a recorded sequence.
In the presence of military leaders and mandarins from the Purple Myrtle Court, these seals are ceremonially broken in half. It is considered an honour to be the man entrusted with doing this.
Before taking his army to the field, a commander is given a certain number of these seals—or half-seals, to be precise. Orders relayed to him from court are accompanied by the matching half-seal. The messengers carrying these have been Kanlin Warriors, for several hundred years. They are trusted by all parties to any conflict, and in that trust lies their sanctity.